[Marxism] Venezuela’s communes form the front line of a difficult revolutionary struggle

[Stuart Munckton via Marxism]

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Every commune is different, George Ciccariello-Maher says in *Building the
Communes*, but “the coffee is always too sweet, and the process is always
difficult, endlessly messy and unpredictable in its inescapable creativity”.

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/venezuela%E2%80%99s-communes-form-front-line-difficult-revolutionary-struggle
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[Marxism] Fwd: H-Net Review [H-SAE]: Lorenz on Meng and Lehrer, 'Jewish Space in Contemporary Poland'

[Andrew Stewart via Marxism]

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-- Forwarded message --
From: H-Net Staff 
Date: Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 4:40 PM
Subject: H-Net Review [H-SAE]: Lorenz on Meng and Lehrer, 'Jewish Space in
Contemporary Poland'
To: h-rev...@h-net.msu.edu


Michael Meng, Erica Lehrer, eds.  Jewish Space in Contemporary
Poland.  Bloomington  Indiana University Press, 2015.  312 pp.
$35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-01503-7; $85.00 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-253-01500-6.

Reviewed by Jan Lorenz (Adam Mickiewicz University)
Published on H-SAE (October, 2016)
Commissioned by Michael B. Munnik

The already substantial area of research on Jews and Jewish heritage
in contemporary Poland has been dominated by discussions on memory
and identity. The topic of Poland's Jewish space has drawn the
attention of scholars, but now it has finally received its own
dedicated collection of readings, edited by an anthropologist, Erica
Lehrer, and a historian, Michael Meng. The collection combines
reflections on the lived spaces of contemporary Poland and on
villages, towns, and cities where Polish Jews lived before the Second
World War, as well as ghettos, death camps, and Jewish cemeteries.

It is impossible to exhaust the theme of Jewish spaces in Poland in a
single volume, but the twelve chapters in this pioneering and long
overdue collection cover significant topical ground and offer
theoretical contributions, which--if not revolutionary for the
anthropology of space per se--are certainly intellectually evocative
in the more specific area of scholarship on memory and cultural
heritage. As Lehrer and Meng argue, "spaces" have considerable
heuristic potential to "turn memory into a thing one can visit," when
they come to materialize and anchor "manifestations of large, often
distant political, legal and economic shifts," making them tangible
enough to be grasped methodologically and analytically (p. 5). This
collection, to a considerable degree, builds on the particular strain
of research that examines how Jewish and, to a greater extent,
non-Jewish actors, individuals, and institutions are engaged in
commemoration of the Polish-Jewish past, renovation of the Jewish
material heritage, and (re)production of Jewish music and craft. We
are invited to consider the ethical and political implications and
potentialities created by these practices, for Poles, Jews, and those
who identify as both, and for locals and foreign visitors.

The book begins in a truly Dantean manner: guided by Geneviève
Zubrzycki, the reader explores the "ideological configuration and
reconfiguration" of the material remains of the Auschwitz
concentration camp, where predominantly Jews but also Romani, ethnic
Poles, and people of other nationalities were exterminated (p. 16).
Zubrzycki argues that while Auschwitz is widely and increasingly
recognized by Poles as a camp where predominantly Jews were killed,
it still holds a central place as a national symbol of martyrdom
rivaled only by Katyń--which speaks of the possibility, at least, of
sharing the material symbol of collective suffering without
necessarily warranting its ownership on the exclusion of the
suffering of others. This raises the question of the extent to which
the categories of "Poles" and "Jews" the author employs when
describing these radically exclusionary positions reflect the
heterogeneity of attitudes and vehement debates these issues sparked
in the Poland of the time. That question aside, this is a valuable
contribution to the discussion on politics and practices of
commemoration at death camps.

Sociologist Stanisław Kapralski's account of "symbolic exclusion" of
Jews from local memories of Polish towns and villages draws our
attention to concrete examples of the politics of memory of the
Communist era (p. 156). For decades, either Jewish martyrdom was
erased from commemoration or Jewish victims were subsumed under the
generic category of "Polish victims." "Polish" here is implicitly
ethnic Poles; an inclination for such erasures is something Poland's
Communist regime and right-wing ethnonationalists had in common.
Kapralski's strongest contribution to this volume and debates on
Jewish spaces, or, to keep with his terminology, Poland's Jewish
"memoryscapes," is his insistence that any conceptualizations that
operate with generic categories of "Poles" or "Polish memory" (or,
alternatively, of "Jewish memory") should always be approached with
caution.

Former sites of Jewish presence can become spaces of memory work and
a number of studies in the collection invite us to consider ways in
which politics of erasure have been replaced with practices of
commemoration, not without its challenges 

[Marxism] Fwd: Marked for death by Trump when he was 15 | SocialistWorker.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://socialistworker.org/2016/10/26/marked-for-death-by-trump-when-he-was-15
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[Marxism] Fwd: I Went Undercover With a Border Militia. Here's What I Saw. | Mother Jones

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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This should be interesting. Shane Bauer went undercover in the same way 
he did a while ago working as a prison guard for a private prison in 
Louisiana, a story that appeared on NPR. Shane was one of the 3 hikers 
jailed as spies in Iran when they accidentally strayed into Iranian 
territory from Iraq.


http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/undercover-border-militia-immigration-bauer
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Political Feminism: the Legacy of Victoria Woodhull

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Yeah, it's been pretty laughable lately with the op-ed in the NYT 
linking Marx to Trump.


On 10/26/16 5:17 PM, Mark Lause wrote:

Given her record in dealing with more "moderate" suffragists, the idea
that Victoria Woodhull, her sister, or anyone involved in shaping the
1872 Equal Rights Party would see Hillary Clinton as a successor in any
way, shape or form is simply laughable.

ML


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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Political Feminism: the Legacy of Victoria Woodhull

[Mark Lause via Marxism]

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Given her record in dealing with more "moderate" suffragists, the idea that
Victoria Woodhull, her sister, or anyone involved in shaping the 1872 Equal
Rights Party would see Hillary Clinton as a successor in any way, shape or
form is simply laughable.

ML
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: The Nature of Capitalism | Jacobin

[Fred Murphy via Marxism]

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The book is excellent and worth the effort if only for Chapter 13, a
thorough recasting of Capital volume 1 to account for capital's adoption of
fossil fuels and persistence in their use, environmental consequences be
damned.

On Mon, Oct 24, 2016 at 11:56 AM, Louis Proyect via Marxism <
marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu> wrote:

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>
> A review of a book on climate change by Andreas Malm, who co-wrote a very
> good book on Iran. I doubt I will have time to read his book but there is a
> 100 page or so article that I printed out about a year ago that I should
> have time for.
>
> https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/10/climate-crisis-fossil-fue
> l-renewables-marx-malm/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Millennials and “unnatural” deaths under Stalin | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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https://louisproyect.org/2016/10/26/millennials-and-unnatural-deaths-under-stalin/
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[Marxism] Fwd: Stop calling warmongers “anti-war activists” | Simon Pirani's archive

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Stop calling warmongers “anti-war activists”
An open letter to the Stop the War coalition

Dear friends,

This is to ask you to think about your organisation’s alliance with 
Boris Kagarlitsky, the Russian political commentator who supports war in 
Ukraine.


In a statement of 19 October, the Stop the War Coalition (STW) described 
Kagarlitsky as an “anti-war activist” and a “leader and organiser” of 
anti-government protests. The statement, responding to an inaccurate 
article in the Sunday Times, acknowledged that organisations Kagarlitsky 
works for are funded by the Kremlin, and claimed that this amounted to 
only “one grant for research”.


The statement is wrong. It is full of untruths, half-truths and 
obfuscations. In reality, (1) Kagarlitsky is not an “anti-war activist”, 
but a supporter of war in eastern Ukraine. (2) Kagarlitsky has been 
involved in anti-government protests, but since 2014 has become a 
collaborator with leading ultra-nationalists and fascists, and is 
reviled by Russian and Ukrainian anti-war activists for that reason. (3) 
Kagarlitsky has accepted funds from the Kremlin via various channels 
since at least 2009, and probably since 2005 – not “one grant for 
research”, but many grants.


I write as a lifelong participant in the labour movement and, for the 
last 25 years, a researcher of Russian and Ukrainian history, politics 
and economy. I have no interest in supporting the Sunday Times and its 
witch-hunts against Jeremy Corbyn. But witch-hunts have to be fought 
with the truth, and your organisation is not telling the truth. Here are 
some details on the three points mentioned.


full: 
https://piraniarchive.wordpress.com/home/investigations-campaigns-and-other-stuff/stop-calling-warmongers-anti-war-activists/

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[Marxism] Fwd: Syria’s “Voice of Conscience” Has a Message for the West

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Interview with Yassin Al-Haj Saleh in Glenn Greewald's Intercept, a 
magazine that some Syrian solidarity activists have mistakenly 
identified as an Assadist outlet.)


Q: Please tell us briefly about your own background in Syria.

A: As a university student in the late 1970s, I was a member of one of 
two Communist Party organizations actively opposing the regime. At that 
time, there was an uprising in Syria that involved students, trade 
unionists, lawyers, and members of other professions who were fighting 
against the Assad government, as well as a separate conflict between the 
regime and the Muslim Brotherhood. There were regular worker strikes in 
Aleppo, where I was living, and I saw with my own eyes security forces 
breaking down the doors of homes and businesses.


To be arrested in Assad’s Syria, you didn’t need reasons. But in 1980, 
hundreds of my comrades and I were detained as part of a campaign by the 
government to break Syrian society.


I was young, and the early years in jail were very difficult. We 
suffered harsh treatment. In later years, our conditions were not so bad 
and we were allowed books and dictionaries. I learned English inside 
prison, and for 13 years, I read maybe 100 books or more per year. In 
the last year of my imprisonment, I was transferred to Tadmor prison, 
which is one of the most vicious places on the planet — a concentration 
camp for torture, humiliation, hunger, and fear. I was then released in 
1996.


The experience of prison transformed me and my ideas about the world. In 
many ways, it was an emancipatory experience. I developed the belief 
that to protect our fundamental values of justice, freedom, human 
dignity, and equality, we had to change our concepts and theories. The 
Soviet Union had fallen and many changes were occurring in the world. My 
comrades who refused to change, those who adhered to their old methods 
and tools, found themselves in a position of leaving their values 
behind. This is one reason why many leftists today are against the 
Syrian revolution — because they adhere to the dead letter of their 
beliefs, rather than the living struggle of the people for justice.


Q: What did you expect from the left in its response to the Syrian 
revolution?


A: It came to me as a shock, actually, that most of them have sided with 
Bashar al-Assad. I don’t expect much out of the international left, but 
I thought they would understand our situation and see us as a people who 
were struggling against a very despotic, very corrupt, and very 
sectarian regime. I thought they would see us and side with us. What I 
found, unfortunately, is that most people on the left know absolutely 
nothing about Syria. They know nothing of its history, political 
economy, or contemporary circumstances, and they don’t see us.


In America, the leftists are against the establishment in their own 
country. In a way, they thought that the U.S. establishment was siding 
with the Syrian revolution — something that is completely false and an 
utter lie — and for this reason they have stood against us. And this 
applies to leftists almost everywhere in the world. They are obsessed 
with the White House and the establishment powers of their own 
countries. The majority are also still obsessed with the old Cold 
War-era struggles against imperialism and capitalism.


Recently, an event in Rome that displayed images of those tortured and 
killed by Assad was attacked by fascists. Just days before, it had also 
been attacked in a local communist newspaper for promoting 
“imperialism.” There is a growing convergence between the views of 
fascists and the far-left about Syria and other issues. The reason for 
this is that perspectives on the left are outdated. They are interested 
in high-politics, not grassroots struggles. They are dealing with grand 
ideologies and historical narratives, but they don’t see people — the 
Syrian people aren’t represented. They are holding on to depopulated 
discourses that don’t represent human struggle, life, and death.


full: 
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/26/syria-yassin-al-haj-saleh-interview/

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[Marxism] Fwd: UI Press | John Rodden | Of G-Men and Eggheads: The FBI and the New York Intellectuals

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Spy romances of Cold War counterespionage evoke scenes of heroic FBI and 
CIA agents dedicated to smashing communism and its subversive coterie of 
intellectual fellow travelers bent on painting the world red.


John Rodden cuts this tall tale down to its authentic pint size, 
refusing to indulge the public relations myth promoted by J. Edgar 
Hoover's FBI. In Of G-Men and Eggheads, Rodden portrays federal agents’ 
hilarious obsession with monitoring that ever-present threat to national 
security, the American literary intellectual. Drawing on government 
dossiers and archives, Rodden focuses on the onetime members of a 
radical political sect of ex-Trotskyists (barely numbering a thousand at 
its height), the so-called New York intellectuals. He describes the 
nonsensical decades-long pursuit of this group of intellectuals, 
especially Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, and Irving Howe. The 
Keystone Cops style of numerous FBI agents is documented carefully in 
Rodden's meticulous case studies of how Hoover's men recruited 
informants to snoop on the "Commies," opened their personal mail, 
tracked their movements, and reported on their wives and friends.


full: 
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/52drd9rk9780252040474.html

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[Marxism] Fwd: Without compelling change on ground there is no end for war in Syria, says prominent political scientist Gilbert Achcar - Region - World - Ahram Online

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/2/8/246448/World/Region/Interview-Without-compelling-change-on-the-ground-.aspx
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[Marxism] Fwd: Not Just Another Stinky Fish - The New York Times

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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Branford, Conn. — In a bay near this coastal town, the sea was boiling 
with hundreds of herring-size shiners leaping to flee a marauding squad 
of bluefish. “These waters are coming back,” Bren Smith yelled above the 
shrieking din, as sea gulls plunged near our boat, scooping up fish. Mr. 
Smith grows seaweed and shellfish in Long Island Sound, and he says he’s 
seen a lot more action out here recently.


What thrilled me about this scene was that I was witnessing what happens 
when fishery managers set strict catch limits to stop overfishing.


Those leaping silvery fish were menhaden, also known as bunker, or 
pogies. To Mr. Smith and other fishermen I spoke to, there are 
encouraging signs that the menhaden population along the Atlantic Coast 
is healthy after decades of intensive commercial exploitation. Other sea 
creatures whose lives are intertwined with them also seem to be doing 
well. Sharks, whales, bluefish, tuna, osprey and other predators depend 
in part on these fish.


“There’s all this life that wasn’t there before,” John McMurray, who 
captains his own charter boat, told me. He said it’s been a boon for his 
sports fishing business off Long Island: “In the past four years, 
striped bass fishing has gotten a lot better, bluefish as well. We’re 
even getting bluefin tuna coming inshore to feed on the schools of 
menhaden.”


Menhaden are filter feeders. They swim in vast schools of hundreds of 
thousands of fish. Mouths agape as they feed, menhaden are living vacuum 
cleaners sucking up algae blooms that deplete inshore waters of oxygen 
and create biological deserts in the sea. A single adult menhaden can 
clean four to seven gallons of water in a minute.


full: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/opinion/not-just-another-stinky-fish.html


With its putrid smell, bony flesh and rancid oily taste, the menhaden 
would seem the least likely candidate for “The Most Important Fish in 
the Sea,” the title of H. Bruce Franklin’s brilliant new 
environmentalist study. But Franklin is not being ironic. The menhaden 
is the most important fish in the sea if you understand its ecological 
purpose.


While it is understandable that groups like Greenpeace would take up the 
cause of sea creatures at the top of the food chain, like the great 
whales or the bluefin tuna, Franklin understands that without the easily 
dismissed menhaden, those above it on the food chain do not stand a 
chance. This includes the human race as well, since the menhaden is 
particularly suited to cleaning up plankton-ridden waters. As one of the 
few marine specimens that thrive on microscopic plant life or 
phyloplanton, it is uniquely positioned to purify waters that have 
become virtual swamps as a result of the massive influx of 
nitrogen-based fertilizers from farms, lawns and golf courses. With much 
of the Gulf of Mexico having been turned into a vast dead zone by 
fertilizer run-off from the Mississippi River, there is a drastic need 
for the humble menhaden.


full: 
https://louisproyect.org/2007/05/28/the-most-important-fish-in-the-sea/

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[Marxism] Fwd: What Do Trump and Marx Have in Common? - The New York Times

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Just for laughs.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/opinion/what-do-trump-and-marx-have-in-common.html
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Re: [Marxism] Fwd: Why Is Dating in the App Era Such Hard Work? - The Atlantic

[Craig Butosi via Marxism]

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"What dates like these remind me of is job interviews. Everything is riding
on your initial appearance Everything in capitalist society, including
people and nature, are seen from the point of view of their exchange value."

Weigel's observations reminded of Eva Illouz's *Cold Intimacies: The
Makings of Emotion Capitalism;* in particular, where she says that the
entire dynamic of online dating is completely reversed from previous forms
of Romantic interaction: "If attraction usually precedes knowledge of
another person, here knowledge precedes attraction ... [P]eople are
apprehended first as a set of attributes and only then ... do they
apprehend the bodily presence of another". The idea here being that online
dating is a sort of marketplace of commodified personalities (profiles),
which are nothing more than readily computable, idealized representations
of the self  that happen to be measurable, machine-readable aggregates of
discrete attributes and variables (the profile structures themselves
configured and predetermined by the dating service).

If alienation is the loss of the bond to reality, as Marx suggests, then
the superstructural manifestation of the online dating world is a pretty
compelling example. *Cold Intimacies *comes highly recommended, by the way.


FWIW



Craig Butosi, MA, MLIS, BMus Hons.
Website: craigbutosi.ca
Library: library.craigbutosi.ca
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[Marxism] Fwd: Political Feminism: the Legacy of Victoria Woodhull

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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The first woman to run for the White House was born in September 1838 in 
Homer in rural Ohio. Victoria California Claflin was the 7th of 10 
children born to parents who lived on the undesirable end of the social 
spectrum. Her mother worked in brothels while her con artist father 
regularly beat his children during drunken rages, of which there were 
many. He also used his offspring to carry out his numerous con jobs.


Victoria California Claflin would later become Victoria Woodhull and in 
April 1871 announced her candidacy for President of the United States 
through a letter to the editor in the New York Herald. A year later she 
was formally nominated by the Equal Rights Party in the Spring of 1872. 
Frederick Douglas, the much-heralded freed slave, was nominated as 
Woodhulls running mate even though he never accepted it and had declared 
his support for the eventual winner, Ulysses S. Grant!


It was a sign that although they wanted to be taken seriously, the Equal 
Rights Party and Victoria Woodhull failed to run a serious campaign. 
There was also the little problem of their female candidate not having 
the right to vote or indeed be of the right age. Woodhull was just shy 
of the minimum age barrier of 35 to take office as president of the USA.


full: 
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/10/26/political-feminism-the-legacy-of-victoria-woodhull/


The people who launched a section of the Communist International in the 
USA were veteran radicals, who had fought against slavery and for 
women's rights for many years. They saw the emerging anti-capitalist 
struggles in Europe, most especially the Paris Commune of 1871, as 
consistent with their own. They saw revolutionary socialism as the best 
way to guarantee the success of the broader democratic movement. What 
European Marxism would think of them is an entirely different matter.


The names of some of the early recruits should give you an indication of 
the political character of the new movement. Included were abolitionists 
Horace Greely, Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner. Feminist Victoria 
Woodhull joined in and put her magazine "Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly" 
at its disposal. The weekly not only included communications from Karl 
Marx, but spiritualist musings from Woodhull. The native radical 
movement of the 1870s was a mixed bag. Socialism, anti-racism, feminism, 
pacifism and spiritualism co-existed comfortably. The Europeans were 
anxious to purify the movement of all these deviations from the very 
start. Unfortunately they put anti-racism, feminism and spiritualism on 
an equal footing.


Victoria Woodhull was unquestionably the biggest irritant, since she 
defended all these deviations while at the same time she spoke out 
forcefully for free love, the biggest deviation imaginable in the 
Victorian age:


"The sexual relation, must be rescued from this insidious form of 
slavery. Women must rise from their position as ministers to the 
passions of men to be their equals. Their entire system of education 
must be changed. They must be trained to be like men, permanent and 
independent individualities, and not their mere appendages or adjuncts, 
with them forming but one member of society. They must be the companions 
of men from choice, never from necessity."


full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/american_left/woodhull.htm
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[Marxism] Fwd: Trump says Clinton will Start WW III with Russia, but Moscow Disagrees | Informed Comment

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.juancole.com/2016/10/clinton-russia-disagrees.html
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[Marxism] Fwd: He Who Hesitates Is Lost And Russia Hesitated -- Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.org

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Paul Craig Roberts, a former economics policy adviser in the Reagan 
administration, writes those typical Counterpunch articles about Russia 
being the world's best hope for peace and national sovereignty. On his 
personal blog, he is not hesitant to bare his teeth. What a mad hatter.)


Russia had a victory for Syria and democracy in its hands, but Putin 
lacked the decisiveness of a Napoleon or a Stalin and let his victory 
slip away as a result of false hopes that Washington could be trusted. 
Now a Russian/Syrian victory would require driving the Turks and 
Americans out of Syria.


If Russia struck hard and fast, Russia could succeed by using 
Washington’s lie and claiming that Russia thought the US and Turkish 
forces were ISIS, just as Washington claimed when Washington 
intentionally struck a known Syrian Army position.


full: 
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2016/09/24/he-who-hesitates-is-lost-and-russia-hesitated-paul-craig-roberts/

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[Marxism] Fwd: Economics has become political - bookforum.com / omnivore

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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http://www.bookforum.com/blog/16742
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[Marxism] Fwd: Why Is Dating in the App Era Such Hard Work? - The Atlantic

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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As Weigel tells it, dating is an unintended by-product of consumerism. 
Nineteenth-century industrialization ushered in the era of cheap goods, 
and producers needed to sell more of them. Young women moved to cities 
to work and met more eligible men in a day than they could previously 
have met in years. Men started taking women out to places of 
entertainment that offered young people refuge from their sharp-eyed 
elders—amusement parks, restaurants, movie theaters, bars. “The first 
entrepreneurs to create dating platforms,” Weigel calls their 
proprietors. Romance began to be decoupled from commitment. Trying 
something on before you bought it became the new rule.


Then as now, commentators fretted that dating commercialized courtship. 
In the early 20th century, journalists and vice commissioners worried 
that the new custom of men paying for women’s dinners amounted to 
prostitution. Some of the time it surely did—just as today, some dating 
websites, like SeekingArrangement, pair “sugar babies” with “sugar 
daddies” who pay off college debts and other expenses. “Ever since the 
invention of dating, the line between sex work and ‘legitimate’ dating 
has remained difficult to draw,” Weigel writes. Well before app users 
rated potential partners so ruthlessly, daters were told to “shop 
around.” They debated whether they “owed” someone something “in exchange 
for” a night out. Today, as Weigel notes, we toss around business jargon 
with an almost transgressive glee, subjecting relationships to 
“cost-benefit analyses” and invoking the “low risk and low investment 
costs” of casual sex.




full: 
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/dating-disrupted/501119/


I answered a personal ad myself once. The woman who had placed it was 
Kerri Jacobs, a high-profile journalist who wrote for Metropolitan 
magazine on architecture. She has moved on to New York Magazine, where 
she is a regular columnist on the same topic. New York Magazine is one 
of the prime locations for personal ads, especially for conventional New 
Yorkers. She had placed her ad in the New York Review of Books, a locale 
for the more intellectually pretentious. Since she was an extremely 
good-looking young woman, I couldn't exactly figure out why she had 
placed an ad. After a few moments, I figured it out completely. Nobody 
was good enough for her. The ads were supposed to help weed out 
"losers," as she put it. I didn't even want to find out if I was a 
winner and never called her back.


What dates like these remind me of is job interviews. Everything is 
riding on your initial appearance. Not only do you have to look right, 
you also have to find the words that the interviewer wants to hear. I 
had to put up with this nonsense when I worked on Wall Street. Why would 
I or any sensitive person have to put up with it in affairs of the 
heart? One of the reasons that Columbia University was such a 
deliverance for me was that I would no longer have to put up with the 
stupid questions of people in the Personnel Office. "Why do you think 
Paine-Webber and you are suitable for each other?" "I don't know. The 
thought of working at another one of these Wall Street dumps makes me 
sick to my stomach. I just need the money to pay for my rent, scholarly 
Marxist books and African music CD's."


The unstated, and therefore more powerful, message of this movie is that 
the cash nexus distorts everything. Everything in capitalist society, 
including people and nature, are seen from the point of view of their 
exchange value. This colors everything. The way we speak reflects this 
alienated existence. We speak of the "investment" we have in an intimate 
relationship. We are worried whether our "assets" are to be found in our 
appearance, like Richard Gere's, or in our intelligence or wit, like 
Woody Allen's (well, from 25 years ago anyhow).



full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/unmade_beds.htm
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Re: [Marxism] more on the Dylan thread

[Greg McDonald via Marxism]

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On his later work, i have not read Maqusee's newest edition, "Wicked
Messenger", but I am a huge fan of albums such as "Oh Mercy", "Time out of
Mind", "Love and Theft", and "Modern Times".  Dylan uses the backdrop of
the apocalypse to create a mood that matches the inner emotions of
heartbreak and loss. Below are a few examples:

Not Dark Yet (but it's getting there)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZgBhyU4IvQ#t=325.002083

Love Sick

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Abbu5hcH0kk

Cold Irons Bound

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hO-83CIVKM

When the Deal Goes Down

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEoGqUqy-0w

Things Have Changed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9EKqQWPjyo

And here's our favorite son Chris Robinson and the Brotherhood doing a
Dylan cover:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1wJAWdAR1w

Sure am glad Chris doesn't have to scream over Rich and Marc's guitars
anymore.
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Re: [Marxism] more on the Dylan thread

[Greg McDonald via Marxism]

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Interview with Marqusee in Counterpunch:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2003/12/12/does-dylan-still-matter-an-interview-with-mike-marqusee/

https://vimeo.com/96138378
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Re: [Marxism] more on the Dylan thread

[Greg McDonald via Marxism]

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Marqusee argues that in spite of himself Dylan did make the world a better
place with his music.

Early on Dylan  seemed to be torn between emulating Little Richard, on the
one hand, and Woody Guthrie, on the other. He reconciled that dilemma by
achieving a synthesis. The interesting part is the reaction he got from the
hard-core folkies. The level of hostility directed toward him was simply
beyond belief. When he took the Band on his electric tour, he would start
with an acoustic set, playing from his early protest repertoire, and in the
second set the Band would come on stage and plug in for the electric part
of the show. But even that was not enough for the hardcore folk fans
addicted to "form".

In this clip from "No Direction Home", a fan calls him Judas from the
audience. You can see Dylan's reaction. He then turns to the Band and tells
them to "play it fucking loud".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCGPhzWWgco

In another scene from the same film, his coterie discusses what to do in
response to a death threat. Both Dylan and the Beatles were receiving a
multitude of death threats. Dylan had set up residence with his wife Sara
and her child in Woodstock. When Dylan caught word of the festival which
was to be organized just down the road, he lit out for the Isle of Wight
because he was concerned about people wandering around on his property. Any
crazed and disillusioned folkie with a gun could do him harm. Look what
happened to Lennon. So much for music "making the world a better place".
What does one do with a Judas after all? You murder him. Music seemed to be
bringing the worst out in people, not the best.

Here he is at the Isle of Wight. He was relaxed and in good spirits. The
Beatles were in the audience. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, but
Altamont was just around the corner.

http://www.jambase.com/article/watch-rare-footage-bob-dylan-band-isle-wight-1969

In "The Last Waltz", Robbie Robertson was asked why the Band decided to
call it a day. Look, he said, we've been on the road for 16 years. Three
members of our group are already junkies. The new wave of artists seemed to
be more interested in breaking things up, but we were not really interested
in all that so we began to destroy ourselves instead.

In an earlier interview with the press after going electric, a reporter
asks Dylan if his new interest in rock music meant he was selling out, and
if so, what was his choice for achieving fame and fortune. Dylan responded,
"ladies garments". One of the first commercials in which he allowed one of
his songs to be used was an ad for Victoria's Secret, about a million years
later.

Greg
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